The Flask

by Nicky Singer

  Instead of catching the bolt, he’s caught his knuckles.

  He kicks himself out from under the car, still cursing, and I elbow my way out behind him.

  His knuckles are bleeding and I don’t like the blood, not because my stepfather is hurting, but because the blood came when he was speaking about Clem and that brings the monsters closer. I mean, why did it have to be Clem, the weaker twin, the one who dips – why did it have to be Clem’s name all spilt and spattered with blood?

  “Half-inch,” says Si, sucking at his fist. “Should have used a half-inch not a 9/16th. Idiot.”

  I need to do something to help. “Shall I get you a plaster?”

  “Yes – over there.” He nods at a cabinet at the other end of the garage, beneath the Morris Authorised Dealer sign and a bunch of red onions. “Top drawer, I think.”

  I find an old box with a random selection of different-sized plasters and help him patch himself up. Mum would have made him wash his hands first.

  “First rule of mechanics – check your socket size. Right. Let’s try again.”

  I hand him a half-inch socket and we both resume positions underneath the car. This time the bolts come away easily.

  He removes the timing chain cover and then slides out again.

  “We’ll do the timing marks from up top,” he says. “They need to be lined up and the crank has to be at TDC,” he says. “Do you remember TDC?”

  “Top Dead Centre,” I say.

  “That’s my girl!” he says.

  His girl.

  He works in silence for a while, but his mind, not unlike mine, remains with the twins, because then he says, “There’ll be a rehearsal operation first.”

  “What?”

  “A rehearsal. When they go through everything. Who’s going to do what on the day. So, unlike us, they don’t end up with the wrong-sized socket.”

  “But what if they do end up with something wrong?”

  He pauses. “They won’t. That’s the point of the rehearsal.” He smiles, but this time it’s a little tight. “Come on now – chain tensioner.”

  He fiddles with something I can’t see and the timing chain comes free. It looks nothing much, it looks like a slightly bigger version of a bicycle chain. Yet it can rattle and break and make the engine fail. The car remains all mixed up with Clem.

  “Now all we have to do,” Si says, holding the new chain, “is fit this little beauty and redo everything in reverse order.”

  But it doesn’t happen quite that way because, when he’s fitted the new chain and checked the timing marks again and refitted the tensioner, he has to turn the crankshaft two revolutions and when he does that one of the chain teeth jumps and the timing marks are out of alignment.

  “Typical!” he says. He looks at his watch. “Maybe we should break,” he says. “Get some lunch.”

  “No,” I say, “we have to finish it. Get the job done. Now.”

  “Since when did you become chief mechanic?” he says, but he’s smiling as he starts all over again.

  I wonder then what will happen with the babies if something goes wrong, because an operation is not like a car, and the doctors won’t just be able to start it all over again, will they?

  Eventually Si gets the cover back on and checks and seals the new gasket so it doesn’t leak oil. Then he reassembles the radiator. It’s late, late into the afternoon now.

  “Now for the moment of truth,” Si says, and he starts the engine.

  The car coughs and spits and rattles, and then roars into life.

  “Fantastic,” he says. “Listen.”

  I listen.

  “Not a peep,” he says, face beaming.

  So we won this one, I think, despite the blood on Clem. We’ve kept the monsters at bay.

  Si turns the engine off, gets out and pats the car on the bonnet. “My perfect, perfect little moggie.”

  I think about perfect.

  I think about this Morris Traveller 1000, Si’s little moggie, which still rattles and bangs and splutters, but is – according to its loving owner – perfect.

  I think about the flask, which is slightly lopsided, the glass of one of its shoulders slightly thicker than the other. I actually go upstairs and hold it in my hand. The little seed fish (which aren’t swimming today) are actually blemishes, bubbles in the glass which shouldn’t really be there, mistakes in the glassmaking process. These imperfections are also the beautiful part of the flask. They are what shimmer and shine as the flask breathes, lives.

  Then I think about my brothers lying together in their cot. They are not perfect, they are not even normal according to Paddy.

  They’re not any old twins. They’re Siamese.

  In the old days, before medicine could make people perfect, conjoined twins stayed the way they were born. Like Chang and Eng. Si showed me pictures of them online. Born in Thailand (or Siam, as it was then) in 1811, Chang and Eng were joined down the chest in just the same way as Richie and Clem. They began life in the circus, just like Paddy said, being exhibited as ‘curiosities’ all over the world. But they broke free, bought a plantation, ran their own businesses, got married to sisters and had twenty-one children between them. They were happy and lived until they were seventy-two.

  No one tried to separate Chang and Eng. They were allowed to stay together.

  Then I wonder – what’s more perfect? Two little boys joined, or two little boys separated? And I try and imagine a world where everyone is born conjoined and only once every thousand, thousand births, do separate human beings arrive. Then I watch conjoined people bending over the separate cots and gasping. And, all at once, a team of twenty-two doctors (in eleven pairs of two) arrives to sew those little babies together again, so nobody will ever know they were born apart. And when the doctors have done their work and it’s all gone swimmingly, I hear the relatives heave sighs of relief and say, “What perfect little boys.”

  While I’m on perfect, I think about Zoe. I haven’t spoken to her since I discovered her name means life, since she shouted over her shoulder, Since when were we joined at the hip?

  And she hasn’t spoken to me either.

  This friend I made in kindergarten. This person who bounds into my life two or three times a week and with whom I’ve been as close as Richie is to Clem.

  I decide to ring her up, I decide to tell her about her beautiful life-giving name.

  “Hello,” I say brightly.

  “Hi,” she says, but she sounds suspicious, like I’m just about to go all heavy on her again.

  So what I actually say is, “They share more organs than we thought.” It just sort of falls out of me, so maybe I was always going to say this.

  “What?” says Zoe.

  “The twins. They share ribs and a bit of their lower sternum and their abdominal cavity and a bit of pericardium, which is the heart. Their heart.”

  “Oh,” says Zoe.

  “And also their liver. They just have the one liver.”

  “Urgh,” she says. “That’s gross.”

  Gross.

  I put the phone down.

  She rings back.

  “Look,” she says, “I didn’t mean gross like… gross.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “I meant, you know… Nothing against your brothers or anything. And I don’t have a problem with internal organs, but livers. I mean nobody wants to talk about stuff like that, do they?”

  I do. I have to, otherwise it all just sits like a heavy red stone in my brain.

  “Since 1950,” I say to my friend Zoe, “seventy-five per cent of separations result in one live twin.” This isn’t one of Si’s statistics. It’s one I found myself. On the net.

  “Seventy-five per cent?” queries Zoe, as if she’s trying to work out the maths.

  “Yes,” I say. “Or, put it another way, seventy-five per cent of the time, when they separate people who have been,” I pause, “so close… one twin dies.”

  “Oh,” she says.<
br />
  “So who do you think it’ll be?” I ask.

  “Jess…” she begins. “Jess…”

  “Who?” I say.

  “Do we have to—”

  “Who?” I interrupt. “Which one?”

  “Neither – probably neither. Jess – what’s got into you?”

  “You have to say: Richie or Clem.”

  Zoe or Jess?

  “Why are you asking me this stuff?”

  I have a vision: me on my mobile, Zoe on hers. No wire between us, but joined nonetheless, joined by some powerful but invisible signal, and if I press the red button on my phone, that signal will just snap off, snap away.

  I press the red button.

  There should be silence. So how come I hear the rip of a surgeon’s knife?

  The following day we go to the hospital.

  “We’re going to bring your mum home,” says Si.

  “And the babies?”

  “No, not the babies. Not yet. And only Mum for the afternoon. Apparently I can’t be trusted to bring in the right change of clothes.”

  In my pocket I have the flask. It has been quiet and almost colourless every day since I tried to paste the name Liminal on to it. But I’m aware of the breath, its quiet ins and outs. Sometimes I think I even hear it when I’m sleeping. Which is impossible.

  Only, recently, I’ve begun to believe that nothing is impossible.

  Si turns the radio on and we don’t talk much and eventually we arrive at the hospital and ascend fifteen floors in the lift.

  In the Special Care Unit, Mum is not on a bed any more, she’s sitting in a chair beside the babies. I’ve been doing a lot of worrying about the babies, but not about Mum. She looks drained and thin.

  “Here you are,” she says, and she gets up to greet me. “Missed you.” She gives me a hug and I think I can feel her bones.

  “Here’s your big sister, boys,” she says to the babies.

  I look into the Perspex cot and I expect to see that the twins have grown, because babies do grow fast, everyone says so. My, how they’ve grown! But my brothers still look tiny, their heads still not filling their tiny knitted hats. I pay particular attention to Clem – is he really smaller than his brother? I don’t know, maybe not, but his little hand is on Richie’s shoulder, so it still looks like he’s holding on.

  Both babies are asleep, facing each other, their little mouths occasionally munching at precisely the same moment, as if they were having exactly the same eating dream. And then I wonder about their dreams. Do they share dreams, or do they have separate ones?

  “Happy dreams,” I whisper down at them. “Have happy dreams.” And they munch and their eyelids flicker too, and I suddenly feel overwhelmed with love for them.

  It seems no time at all before a nurse comes to wheel them away for yet more tests.

  “They’ll have done so many tests before they come out of here,” jokes Si, “they’ll be able to go straight to university.”

  The nurse laughs, but Mum doesn’t. She just watches the babies leave as if somebody was wheeling away her life.

  “Come on now,” says Si. “Let’s make the most of the time.”

  He takes Mum’s suitcase and her hand and helps her into the lift.

  When we get down to ground level, and the doors swish open on to the outside world, Mum seems to stumble a little, blink in the daylight.

  “Are you all right?” says Si. “Are you sure you want to make the journey? I mean, for such a short time?”

  “Sure,” says Mum. She nods at me. “Got to see my other baby, haven’t I?”

  Si helps her into the car and we begin the journey home.

  “It’s amazing,” says Mum.

  “What?” asks Si.

  “The world,” says Mum, as if she’s been gone from it for a hundred years. “It’s so bright. And big.” She pauses. “And busy.” Then she turns around and looks at me. “And you, Jess, even you’ve changed.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes – you’ve grown up a bit, I think.”

  And I don’t know if she means grown up – mature, or grown up – taller or even just grown up compared with the tiny, tiny twins and I don’t have time to think about this because Si butts in with: “Jess helped me with Roger the Wreck yesterday. We did the timing chain.”

  “The timing chain!” Mum exclaims. “So you’ve finally done it? Turned Roger the Wreck into, well, just Roger?”

  “Well,” says Si, slightly taken aback. “There’s always more one can do on a moggie.”

  Mum laughs and touches him very lightly on the back of the neck.

  And, just for a moment, everything feels all right.

  Si asks Mum what she wants to do with her few hours at home.

  “I want to eat fresh vegetables,” says Mum, “and go to church.”

  There are very few vegetables served in the hospital, apparently, and those that are, are frozen. Mum wants to eat fresh courgettes and fresh onions and fresh tomatoes and fresh mushrooms.

  “And green beans,” says Mum. “I could kill for some green beans.”

  So Si says he will drop her at the church and go on a vegetable hunt.

  “Will you come with me, Jess?” Mum asks.

  Mum doesn’t go to church so much for the the services, but for the candles. When we’re away on holiday, she goes into every church we pass. She lights candles in memory of my father and I light them too.

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

  Si drops us at St Nicholas’ which is a small flint church with a square tower.

  “Do you know what day it is?” she asks as we enter.

  “Saturday,” I say.

  “Holy Saturday,” she says. “The day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The day of Christ’s entombment.”

  “A bardo then,” I say.

  “Huh?” says Mum, but she’s not really listening.

  We’re whispering, even though there is no one in this quiet place but us. The last time I was in this church was at Christmas when it blazed with light and golden angels and dark holly and statues of the Holy Family stood in real straw. Now the church is stripped, there are no flowers, the altar is bare, the cross covered in a black cloth.

  Mum takes a seat at the back of the church, as though she hasn’t quite got the energy to go to the front yet, and I sit beside her. She takes a kneeler and sinks down, head in her hands. I don’t know what she’s praying about, but I can imagine.

  I don’t take a kneeler. I just sit on the hard wooden pew and look at the dense gloom in the church. I wish it was Easter Sunday, I wish someone would just roll back the rock like they did in front of Jesus’ tomb and everything be light and bright again for ever.

  But maybe nothing’s for ever.

  Zoe.

  She’s not for ever, she’s moving on, moving away from me. And if she isn’t going all of her own accord, then I’m pushing her, aren’t I? I’m just putting the knife in and slamming down the phone to show her I don’t care, which just shows how much I do care. Can’t she see that? Then I get cross with myself for sitting in a church and thinking about Zoe when my brothers are probably dying. How can Zoe be as important as the twins? I mean, our relationship, Zoe’s and mine, it’s hardly life or death, is it?

  But that’s how it sometimes feels to me.

  In fact, more than this. It feels that my join with Zoe, which, OK, didn’t start at birth, but was certainly there by the time we were both four, that join, sometimes gets all muddled up in my head with the web that joins my brothers. As though what happens between me and Zoe will impact on what happens to Richie and Clem.

  Yeah, right.

  Mum picks herself up from her prayer, and hangs the kneeler back up.

  “The Anglo-Saxons believed,” she says, “that life is just the flight of a sparrow through a great lighted hall, that we come from the dark and we will return to the dark.”

  I don’t know what this means and I don’t ask her, because she look
s so sad and I know that she’s been to her place when kneeling, just as I’ve been to mine, and it’s probably a private place.

  We go together then towards the front of the church where there’s a candle rack, four rows of little black metal dishes with black metal candle spikes in the middle, and a locked box for donations. There are normally one or two pale, thin candles burning here, but today there are none and Mum hesitates, as though maybe we shouldn’t be lighting candles here on Holy Saturday, maybe we should wait until the Easter light comes in on Sunday.

  But she won’t be here on Easter Sunday. And there are candles waiting beneath the rack and she takes three and posts money into the box.

  Three candles. She has never taken three candles before.

  “First,” she says, “for your father.”

  I hold the candle and she strikes the match.

  “For Jeremy,” she says, as the wick catches.

  “For Dad,” I say and I push the thin wax end on to the spike. You mustn’t push too hard, the candles are so thin that if you do, they can split and fall.

  There’s a moment’s silence between us and then she says that she wants to light candles for the babies. And part of me wants to stop her. I want to say: We can’t light a candle for Dad who’s dead and for the babies who…

  Mum interrupts my thought. “I’ll do one for Richie. Will you do Clem’s?”

  Which brings the monsters.

  Because sometimes, when you light one candle from another, one of the flames gutters, it dies.

  “Yes,” I say, “I’ll do it.”

  The Pavement Crack Game.

  Mum holds Richie’s candle. I hold Clem’s. If either of the flames gutter…

  I light mine first, from Dad’s, and I do it very, very carefully and the flame leaps up. It burns strong and bright, and I let go the breath I’ve been holding and push the candle end very gently on to the spike.

  Clem lives.

  Then Mum takes Richie’s candle and lights it from Clem’s and it doesn’t take immediately, so she pushes down a little harder and there’s a sudden fizz and when she takes the candle away, Richie’s candle is lit and Clem’s extinguished.